


Just a Hobby

by QuailiTea



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Day Off, Drabble Collection, Gen, Hobbies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-09 20:42:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11112483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuailiTea/pseuds/QuailiTea
Summary: Hobbies can tell you a lot about a person. Character studies that are as canon as I can get them.





	1. Chapter 1

In his spare time, Jack gardens. It’s the same as his day job, really. Fighting the good fight against the bad seeds. He’s not in control, but he still brings meticulous order. As he clears weeds, the poppies dance on long stems like a troupe of ballerinas. The clematis and roses scale their trellises in curtains of purple and pink. In his greenhouse, orchids nod coyly; ladies in fashionable hats. He tries not to remember Phryne in every blossom, but some blooms burst upon his consciousness like she does. Whatever was out there, his corner of this world was beautiful.

\---

“I think I’ll try making the carbonara tonight.” Mac was alone, washing her hands in meditative silence after surgery. It had been a complicated operation, and the woman on the table had seemed determined to hemorrhage despite their best efforts. Yes, carbonara, with fresh eggs, her own meticulously rolled pasta, the spring spinach the grocer kept specifically for her. No meat tonight, she’d had enough of blood. And, should Phryne or someone else be free, pasta for two was easier than for one. She could pick the parsley on her way out the doors. Hospital gardens were a handy thing.

\---

When things don’t make sense, Hugh goes fishing. The lake offers the quiet that he could never find in a house full of siblings or a station full of angry citizens. He has a few good haunts that he’ll take his children to one day, but for now, the grayling and perch are only matching wits against him. It isn’t even about the eating, though he does take some home often enough. It’s about the wash of the water, the furling and unfurling of clouds, birds singing riotously, the peaceful thrum of nature, welcoming him into his place in Creation.

\---

Dot loves her sewing. Flickers of beautiful floss become gleaming embroideries; plain thread saving all but the most destroyed collars, hems or stockings. What began as a purely practical skill has become the way she reorders her universe whenever it’s upended by her irrepressible employer. She doesn’t need much – her pincushion, a needlebook, her good Parisian scissors. For big jobs, a tape measure and her sewing machine too. Once, she was content to follow patterns, but as she’s gotten better, she’s found herself trying little experiments, then bigger ones. She makes her own patterns now. She likes it that way.

\---

After Arthur passed, everyone had said Prudence needed a hobby. Something to keep herself busy. And she’d found it, though she doubted hosting Party meetings would be fun for most. But she’d always been an organizer, and Bert’s friends weren’t so bad as the newspapers would color them. Lord knew she’d wrangled with the papers herself. They were good boys, really – young, unemployed, adrift. She let them have their meetings in the barn, and in exchange they’d wash the windows, dig in the fernery, muck the stalls. It kept them out of trouble - her own version of good deeds.

\---

Speed was the thing. Phryne had been stuck so long in Collingwood, when she got the chance to move, she decided to do it as quickly as possible, in every way. Flying, racing her car, even dancing, which let her whirl across the floor instead of decorating the wall or the arm of some joke-telling dandy. It’s almost addiction, except for one thing. It’s not really the speed. It’s the moment at the center, where she’s alone with the wind, or the road, or her partner (Jack perhaps?), breathless in the stillness of the eye of her own self-created hurricane.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Props to Sarahtoo for the nudge to do a second chapter.
> 
> As far as the Baron is concerned, Phryne got him to his ship and went home, or else he's traveling some time later. Whichever works better for you. :)

Between scraping by with the cab and gambling away the profits, Cec never had much time for hobbies. But when he and Bert started making better money, he decided what he wanted was a dog. Alice obliged him when one of her father’s stable dogs whelped – she named him Murphy White Gloves. Now, every day after supper, they all go out in the yard and run Murph through his paces. He can sit, roll, fetch, spin and walk on his hinders. Mutt will do anything for a gingersnap. Alice laughs, blushing, when she hears the new one: “Kiss her Murph!”

\---

There’s a long tradition of poetic soldiers, and Mr. Butler is an accidental part. At first, he wrote mere notes home to Aurelia. Then, after, love letters that he could never send, poems to her wherever she was now. Over the years, it became a bursting stack of bound notebooks – everything from an abandoned epic about the diamond mines of Kimberley to dirty limericks. It’s shuffled together with scraps of striking metaphor that come to him during dark hours, as he waits up for Miss Fisher – lyric beauty captured while facing down sleep and the foxhole dreams of his youth.

\---

As far as Cec knew, Bert haunted the secondhand shops because firsthand ones were Capitalist bastions. Which was true. But Bert loved the treasure hunting too. Digging though Granny Dolores’ tin collections and Aunt Cymbeline’s hair jewelry, only to turn up Sèvres porcelain or a Cartier cigarette case marked three bob. France had taught him more than how to take a life. He knew quality when he saw it now, and if he could find it secondhand, well, more luck him. He brings Mrs. Stanley sometimes – he gives her the nod, she storms the beachhead. They make a good team.

\---

Jane had so much lost time to make up. Miss Fisher was going to see: she’d been right, adopting her. She was going to be an astonishingly accomplished lady. Jane was going to learn Italian next, then German. Then, Chinese from Mrs. Lin. Dr. MacMillan was going to teach her anatomy and all about medicine and poisons, and she already practiced judo and lockpicking and target shooting all the time. She could be a heroine, like in an adventure novel: beautiful clothes paired with deadly wits. She would be a grand adventuress, Jane promised herself. Miss Fisher would surely approve.

\---

Traveling has changed the Baron. He’s tried and abandoned dozens of distractions in his time. Drink was the first, last, and strongest, but there have been others. Cards, horses, dogs, shooting, (im)polite society. It’s never been quite enough. But this trip, something is quietly different. Gratitude at not being crammed into Phryne’s flying deathtrap has settled into unexpected ease. He sails peacefully homeward to his waiting wife and finds himself anticipating each landfall. In Cyprus, he thinks, unbidden and unpained, “Janey would have loved this sunset.” He buys a blue-ribboned poesy in her honor and tosses it from the stern.


End file.
